facts - empirically verifiable realities in the world of space and time; of diminishing value as "facts" the more they are expressed in generalities; can sometimes be expressed mathematically and in relation to other mathematical facts (e.g. "greater than," "less than," largest, smallest, etc.)

alternative facts - an appropriate expression for different-but-comparable data sets.Appropriate: at one point, alternative facts told us with some accuracy that there were more slaves in the world today than ever before in history AND a smaller proportion of the human population is enslaved than ever before in history - because of population growth, these are both "facts", though somewhat generally expressed and needing further definitionNOTAppropriate: the crowd in a particular American city on a particular inauguration day was the largest ever AND the same crowd in the same American city on a particular inauguration day was NOT the largest ever - because of the specificity involved, these are NOT appropriately termed "alternative facts"

opinion - unverifiable expressions of personal/individual preference; often articulated in qualitative judgements like "good" or "bad," "best" or "worst," etc., but prone to reasonable and rapid dismissal without argument by others who merely disagree

T/truth - sometimes used interchangeably with "fact," but unlike "facts" T/truth is not always verifiable, but is usually worth an argument; often depends on some authority larger than the individual, like divine revelation or widely and strongly held communal ideals; a story that points to a larger truth can be deemed true, even if it is not factual (eg. "The Little Red Hen" "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" etc.). Since it is not always verifiable, and authorities may only be recognized by their particular communities, humility is needed and agreement should not necessarily be expected, but contradictory claims that cannot be reconciled through clarification should not BOTH be granted the status of "truth"

paradox - apparently contradictory truth claims that, upon closer examination, turn out NOT to be contradictory, for a variety of reasons (terms are used differently, different times, places and circumstances are being referred to, different perspectives or angles are being offered)

That's right! Religious Freedom in America is a hot topic again. This invariably means that it is a big political topic again.

Of course, our campaign circus 2016 has Trump positioning himself as the champion of Christianity, even though two major conservative news outlets have denounced his positions on religious freedom (National Review and American Conservative). Meanwhile Hilary Clinton, whose husband Bill has an actual track record of controversial advocacy for a Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) last time it was hot (1993, related to Native American traditions, struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997), has bashed the latest round of RFRA proposals, designed mostly to protect conservative Christians from laws banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

In recent SCOTUS history, justices nationalized gay marriage to every state in Obergefell, and in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, they ruled that corporations owned by religious people (counting as religious people themselves) cannot be required to violate their consciences and provide contraceptive health care to employees. According to Gutterman and Murphy, the Hobby Lobby case is dangerous because it allows the possibility for any corporation to violate all sorts of federal labor regulations. The authors don't discuss this, but this case has the power to set such precedent because of a previous case.

​Mid-century, there were many important Supreme Court cases, but in my mind one of the most important was U.S. v. Seeger (1965), which expanded Conscientious Objection status from traditionally religious pacifists to anyone whose "conscience... would give no rest or peace" if they participated in war. According to Phillip Hammond, this case represented a major shift in interpretation. In other words, all sorts of deeply held convictions now "counted" as inviolable under the "free exercise" protection of the First Amendment. Personal "conscience" was the equivalent of "religion."

Thus, even granting that the Affordable Care Act represents government over-reach, Seeger + Hobby Lobby does in fact combine to open the way for all sorts of corporate labor abuses. If a random individual has a strong enough conviction about something (not hiring women, not paying minimum wage, not paying taxes that support x, y or z) they may have a case. The Libertarian end of the political spectrum might think this is all "in bounds" and the market will sort it out. On the other hand, lower courts in Oregon, Texas and Colorado have not upheld the cases of Christian cake bakers who refused to bake cakes for gay or lesbian weddings, but SCOTUS has not had to deal with any such case so far.

How various POTUS and SCOTUS choices will deal with our current milieu over time is hard to tell. I'm fairly confident that politicians will be politicians. George Washington, for all his irenic statements and respect for religion's role in society still valued "the interests of the nation" above "the conscientious scruples" of citizens and expected the citizens to give government "on all occasions their effectual support" (letters to Quakers and Jews respectively, qtd. in Gutterman and Murphy, 1). In other words, don't expect them to do anything that isn't in their own interests.

This is a hard post to write, because suggesting any sort of gulf that favors the scholarly view is going to be tainted with a certain elitism that smacks of the sort of gulf represented above, where a semi-divine historical person presides over the terrestrial mess of mortals. There are things that they know that mere mortals cannot know. And you know that scholars are not semi-divine. Nevertheless, a gulf exists. I write this as someone whose academic training was a blend of history, social sciences and theology, so I am not strictly "a historian," though the American founding does factor into my work.

The gulf I have in mind was brought back to the forefront of my mind when Susan Lim, a reputable Christian historian at Biola recently wrote an article about religion and the Founding Fathers for Christianity Today. Lim wrote,

"Washington’s successor, John Adams, was born into a devout Christian family and raised to carry on Puritan traditions. The second president of the United States never wavered away from his faith, nor did he ever see any conflict in being both an independent thinker and committed Christian. As David McCullough recounts in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Adams regularly boasted of his Puritan ancestry, sometimes bordered on legalism (he often refused to travel on the Sabbath), and occasionally cast stones against those he deemed less spiritual than himself. For example, Adams made it a point to highlight Jefferson’s nontraditional religious convictions when they both vied for the presidency."

This surprised me, because I believed it was fairly well established that Adams was basically a U/unitarian (did not believe in the Trinity) unlike the Puritans, though he may have remained in Puritan Congregationalist churches. I wrote the following email to Susan (actually, I emailed "Dr. Lim" who graciously told me to call her Susan):

"I have no doubt that Adams was a man of faith and may have valued his Puritan heritage, but it seems to me that we have it pretty decisively in his own words that he was a Unitarian and (perhaps a bit more ambiguously) that he also had serious reservations about the incarnation. I appreciate the fact that there is some disagreement on this, but it mostly seems to come from American Filiopietists with political agendas. I'm not sure how you say that he"was born into a devout Christian family and raised to carry on Puritan traditions. The second president of the United States never wavered away from his faith, nor did he ever see any conflict in being both an independent thinker and committed Christian." I guess I can sort of spin this in a way, but I think it is liable to mislead many readers."Susan responded: "No doubt, the term "Puritan" is a messy one. I shy away from it in my research. I used it here because I assume that the majority of the readers aren't academics, and the term "Congregational" won't resonate with as many readers. Puritanism has come to mean so many things to so many people; and as I'm sure you know, many of the social constructs of Puritanism were made in the 19th C (largely through fiction) to comment on Victorian society (by using Puritans as actors). Or, as Mencken wrote, that Puritanism is thought of as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. Of course we know that this obviously doesn't do the Puritans justice. What I meant was that John Adams hailed from a Puritan/Congregational family, and remained committed to his Congregational church. Yes, that church (along with many other Congregationalist churches) moved towards Unitarianism by the mid-18th C, but I didn't want to go into the development of Congregationalism (or Puritanism, if you will) here."

Note that if this is true, Adams was in the advance guard of a group of Puritan Congregationalists who rejected the the doctrine of the Trinity that had defined Christian Orthodoxy for around 1400 years. At the time, many/most U/unitarians did consider themselves Christians and their services of worship would have resembled Trinitarian Puritans' services a great deal. Susan Lim is a knowledgeable scholar. She also possesses the virtue of inclusion in her approach to John Adams and Christianity (something many contemporary Christians could learn from). I don't believe she was trying to fool anyone. However, I still think this way of writing about things plays into the hands of those who have a political agenda and are also much sloppier in their characterizations of the faith of the founders.

The point is that in the "translation" process that most historians use when writing for a popular audience (and, keep in mind that many popular writers are also writing history without the benefit of education in the discipline), a great deal of the nuances are left out.

​To review some of the complications about this, check out this post from the American Creation blog, and then read this one. It might be worthwhile looking at some of the comments as well.

Around ten years ago, I realized something. American civil religion is the liberation theology of the liberated.

American civil religion - the ritual practice/s and theological discourse/s that attempt to connect the nation-state to God/"the sacred" and citizens to each other in a "sacred bond" (see Emile Durkheim, Robert Bellah, Martin Marty)Liberation Theology - theological assertion that God is on the side of the oppressed

Recently, I had another realization. American civil religion is also a form of Prosperity Gospel. Essentially, the message is, if Americans have enough of the right kind of faith, the United States will be prosperous and successful. This realization came to me as I was reading Gutterman and Murphy's Political Religion and Religious Politics: Navigating Identities in the United States (Routledge, 2016). In describing the Prosperity Gospel Preacher, Gutterman and Murphy write (quoting Walton) that:

"...ministries are developed around the charismatic authority of a particular [leader] to the extent that the form and function of the ministry often reflects the personal narrative- real or constructed- of its leader." Preachers, in turn, are equally dependent on a receptive and enthusiastic audience. The flashy lifestyles and effusive self-confidence of the prosperity preachers are wholly crowd-dependent... Prosperity ministers often embody a kind of "great man" theory of Christian success... Not only do prosperity preachers offer models of the rewarded faithful person... they also reinforce the this-worldly and consumerist model of individual desire... Religious consumers want to invest themselves in and with winners.

When I started to see Trump as a Prosperity Gospel preacher, asking people to have faith in him and to demonstrate it by "sowing" their vote into his "ministry" in order to become prosperous, a lot of things fell into line. Civil Religion and Prosperity Gospel go together with Trump's rise. So, I did a little searching and found some pretty great resources for those who might be interested in this sort of thinking.

Headlines from the last few months have highlighted the chaos and disarray of right-wing America. Conservatives, or (supposedly synonymously) Republicans are described as rattled, in-revolt, shaken, rocked, disoriented, etc. over Trump's successful campaign. And, even if "they" deserve a Trump candidacy, liberals, moderates, libertarians and anybody else who cares should be concerned about this mangling of one tradition of American democracy. But that's not why I'm writing. I want to highlight something else: the gentle, obscure, rocking of the left. It's not as noisy, colorful or belligerent (okay, over at FOX it is in fact noisy, colorful and belligerent), but while conservatives are currently writing some piercing introspective and high-profile pieces, a little something is also going on leftward.

Here's the thing. As an educator who has worked at two Christian institutions, I can tell you that many educators at relatively conservative schools do an excellent job of challenging our own presuppositions; those ideas that are taken-for-granted-and-never-adequately-questioned by conservative communities. These ideas might relate to gender, politics, theology, sexuality, economics, race and ethnicity, but they are interrogated, and when conservative students want to state their opinions with a belligerent dose of ignorant arrogance, they are asked to think deeply, see the other side of things, etc. Granted, conservative ideas may be given strong social and argumentative support in the end, but they aren't allowed to go unchallenged. I've been less-sure that this happens on the left. A rash of articles, including this one in the NYTimes, indicates that conservatives are nearly as barred from state-funded higher-education as atheists would be from private-Christian higher-education.

Now, recently I have seen a few articles indicating that somewhere on the left is some introspection about its own exclusions and presuppositions, the kind of reflexive scholarship that pomo sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would have considered essential.

Here's a sampling (a lot of this is from the world of social science):At the center of it is Jonathan Haidt's research, now well represented at his Heterodox Academy site. There's a lot of content there, but you might also want to watch his Ted Talk below.

The living memory of centenarians struck me hardest a decade ago, in October 2006 when Enolia McMillan died a few days after her 102nd birthday. Her father, John Pettigen, had been a slave.* Joseph Medicine Crow, the last Crow war-chief (an a WWII vet/hero, historian, anthropologist and educator) turned 100 in 2013 and died just this month. He knew men who rode with Custer against the Sioux, with whom the Crow had a long feud. Rode... with... Custer. He knew them. Susannah Mushatt Jones of Brooklyn is 116, born in 1899 (100 years after the death of George Washington), is the oldest verifiable living human.

Try, just for a minute, to make a list of all the things this woman has seen and lived through, technological developments, legal developments, geo-political development. Today, there are in the order of 50,000 centenarians living in the U.S. and our history is so incredibly short. It's 2016. Next year is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, if you count from Luther's 95 Theses (which most people do, though there are certainly arguments to the contrary). Our country turns 240 this year if you count from the Declaration of Independence, 229 if you count from the ratification of the Constitution, 151 if you count from the end of the Civil War. The last person to sail on the HMS Beagle with Darwin died in 1914. The last veteran of Ft. Sumter died in 1919 when Susannah Jones was 20. The last witness of Lincoln's assassination at Ford's theatre died in 1951, when Jones was 52. The last U.S. and Native American veterans of the Little Big Horn died in 1950 and 1955 respectively, when Medicine Crow was in his forties. Geronimo died in 1909. Joe Medicine Crow was not born yet, but of course Susannah Jones was 9. Like one of my sons is right now.

*The last living American who had been a "legal" slave under the chattel system of the South was Sylvester Magee, who died in 1971 (the historical reality of "Slavery by Another Name" is a different question).

In 1999, evangelical scholar Robert Webber released Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World. Webber is probably the individual most responsible for the resurgence of evangelical interest in high-church ritual and liturgy, but I'm not sure even he could have foreseen the items that have come across my radar in the past couple weeks. I should mention that these stories came to my attention through listening to Krista Tippet's OnBeing show on my NPR One app. The first item concerns a group of hackers being drawn to monastic life and the Rule of St. Benedict - you can read about it here in Nathan Schneider's article for the Nation.

The second item was from tech-guru film-maker Tiffany Shlain who has embraced tech-Sabbaths with her family, where they shut down all their devices for 24 hours and is also trying to use the internet to promote character development. For many cultural observers, the internet is a realm that resists discipline and erodes the character of individuals and societies. What both of these items have in common is an awareness that our context needs what it resists, resulting in an attempt to recapture ancient spiritual disciplines for our very "wired" society.

My enneagram number is 9- the Peacemaker. You can Google it, if you're interested. The point is that in some ways this whole blog theme is an outgrowth of this: as a 9 and an educator, I tend to be a bit obsessed about trying to help people develop empathy and understand perspectives that are not their own, what Yale theologian Miroslav Volf calls "inverting perspectives." For instance, last Fall I spent the first few weeks of a Reformation class I'm teaching at a private Christian school trying to help the 15 Evangelical Protestants understand how Roman Catholics might be right about a lot of things. This is a constant factor for me though. Today provides another example:

I'm reading Alan Thornbury's Recovering Classical Evangelicalism with a group of other Christian guys because, frankly, we tend to read more "progressive" Christian books and I thought it was important to read something anchored in mid-twentieth century evangelicalism to help balance us out, so we don't get stuck in yet another insular way of thinking. I'm not sure what I think or how I feel about the book, but I came across a reference to certain evangelical scholars who had run into employment trouble because they didn't "toe-the-line" of "Classical" evangelical doctrine. One of several scholars listed, and with whose work I was familiar, was Mike Licona, a New Testament scholar and Christian apologist who has dedicated his life to defending the basic reliability of the New Testament account of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus (check out one of his talks explaining the differences between the Gospel accounts here). I was curious, so I did a little Google search and found some information on this atheist's blog. Mike Licona had been fired because, in the course of his 700 page defense of the resurrection of Jesus, he suggested that the account of numerous "saints" exiting their tombs in Matthew 27:52-53 might not be historical. I haven't followed up on his reasons for thinking that the resurrection accounts of Jesus are historical but these aren't, but I respect Licona and find much of his scholarship helpful. Then, as befits internet research, I got distracted.

Another post listed on Atheist Jeffrey Jay Lowder's site caught my attention, atheist Neil Carter's review of God's Not Dead 2, which had some interesting outsider perspective on Christian victim-complex culture as well an account of the film that makes it sound like a sort of evangelical-fantasy Scopes Trial (the famous Dayton, Ohio "Monkey Trial") reprise in reverse regarding the resurrection, but that's besides the point. What was even more interesting was Carter's account of the reversal of the reverse: namely, his account of getting fired from teaching in a Mississippi public school for being a (closeted) atheist. I haven't done a big investigation of his claims and don't really intend to (he also has a great link to the site of evangelical bogeyman ACLU, listing of all the cases in which they have defended religious people's rights to free exercise, including rights to publicly evangelize).

I offer this post for those who didn't know that Christians who dedicate their lives to defending the Christian faith can get fired from Christian institutions for their perspective on 2 odd verses in Matthew and to those who didn't know that atheists can get fired from public schools for... well... not being Christians.

A lot of ink has been spilled explaining how religion goes wrong, becomes evil or turns violent. Here's a whole bunch of religion-slamming memes, just for fun. Lately, pollsters and religious commentators have been tracking the "rise of the nones" (those with no religious affiliation in America, now as many as 20%) and religious leaders are writing a lot about why various demographics (mostly White 18-40 year olds) have left church behind, who is to blame (ie. what is wrong with the way people are "doing" religion) and what they can do to win them back.

The thing is, in my opinion, religion (and here I mean religious communities or people, because "religion" and "religions" don't really exist except as words or theoretical constructs) goes right and wrong along basically the same lines, and frequently people react to it from a personal perspective that corresponds to these basic lines.

First of all, "religion" is essentially communal, as are human beings. I'm not going to try to prove this. I like William James' Varieties of Religious Experience just fine, but everything we call "a religion" has a strong communal element and would not exist very long without it. Likewise for human beings.

Second, every functional community (religious or otherwise) has rules to inform and guide moral behavior, prevent its members from injuring each other and establish boundaries (what does it mean to be part of the community; and "insider" or an "outsider"?).

Third, most of the rules of most communities make some rational sense. I remember reading a book by Marvin Harris called Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, which explain how many cultural norms that seem strange to outsiders actually contribute to the survival and functionality of the communities that hold them. For an example of my own, is a prohibition on non-marital sex and a prescription for lifelong marital fidelity really a mysterious and irrational rule for a community? Every community that has experimented with "free love" in the past 200 years has been a failure. Human beings seem to have some innately possessive ideas about sex that cause huge relational strain when they are violated. If some community wants to try to reinvent the wheel on this, I guess they can try, but I'll be surprised if they are still a community in 20 years.

Fourth, human beings seem unavoidably drawn to the idea of transcendence, something beyond and bigger than themselves. It might just be "the community," whose values then also take on transcendent status ("freedom" "rationality" or what-have-you) but more often transcendence seems to have a divine-personal face, like God, gods or ancestral deities who also sanction (or provide) the community rules.

I think the short list of genuine complaints against religious communities comes down to lack of adaptation to context, and the use/abuse of violence and coercion. Of course these complaints and criticisms assume a set of foundational values that are also somewhat communal and absolute (transcendent in their own way). It's also reasonable to ask why (given their transcendent status) religious communities should adapt their rules or disavow the use of violence and coercion in support of such rules unless adapting rules and disavowing force is in fact part of the rules (Stephen L. Carter's article "The Free Exercise Thereof" in William & Mary Law review, Vol. 8, No. 5 is excellent on this point). It's also reasonable to point out that most existing religious communities have already adapted their rules to some greater or less extent. Sometimes "too little, too late;" other times "better late than never."

So religious communities basically go right and wrong at about the same point. They go right when they try to act like actual communities, which nurture and cultivate the human beings of the community into ways of behaving that honor the basic communal existence and individual honor of human beings. They go wrong when life gets more complicated. For instance, when it must relate as a community (charged with the care of its own) to other communities with competing interests, or when the genuine interest in the cultivation of a specific individual (or set of individuals) within the community competes with the genuine interest of another specific individual (or set of individuals). This is basically the argument of Niebuhr's Moral Man, Immoral Society (see Gushee's post here). Violence is not the only possible outcome. The "rules" are supposed to help work these things out, but sometimes new situations arise, and in a large pluralistic society (like the U.S.), sometimes it's a lot easier for an individual in question to jump ship (or be thrown overboard), than to really work it out.

In America, individualism combined with the "failure to adapt" criticism is probably 90+% responsible for the "nones." In other words, it's not that the religion has gone wrong, but the particular community-oriented rules of a religious community rub individuals (who have not been conditioned to community-oriented life) the wrong way. A national-community, with values of privacy and self-actualization and a gigantic legal code (ie. "rules") to support these individualistic values, is doing a better or more comprehensive job of forming the minds and assumptions of a large segment of the population than any traditionally religious community.

America's voters are a highly divided and contentious bunch these days (these decades?), but it's debatable whether we're really more divided than at other points in America's history. In fact, I think that overwhelmingly, most Americans have an unspoken agreement with most Presidential candidates. The agreement is this: Presidential candidates will pretend that they are running for the office of supreme monarch and American voters will also pretend that they are running for this office, and frequently, we also pretend that this is in fact the office they occupy once 50-60% of us elect one of them. For the most part, we all want to play this game (apparently).

I discovered this by reading the Constitution once a year for the past 4 years with my American History class. If you take a look, you will notice that the President has very limited ("separate and enumerated") powers. For instance, the President has no essential responsibility for the U.S. economy. The President is also not a legislator. And yet, we acclaim or blame the President for the state of the economy. We also name legislation after them, despite the fact that said legislation (theoretically) originates in Congress and pass both houses of Congress to actually become a law).

Candidates famously make all sorts of promises about what they will do with regard to both the economy and legislation and "we the people" seem committed to appraising them on the basis of these proposed policies. For instance, Presidential candidates proclaim their "tax-plan" even though taxes are the jurisdiction of Congress, not the President. Ironically and unfortunately, the "bombing and wall-building" campaigns of GOP candidates, might actually be among the few items proposed by these candidates that fit the Constitutional responsibilities of Presidents, since the latter item relates to enforcing legislation and the former plays upon the now-fuzzy distinction between "making" and "declaring" war (apparently it is now totally acceptable for a President to make war without Congress ever declaring it).

Some people would say that this just goes to show how far we have drifted from the actual Constitution, and they would be right. By my reckoning, very few Presidents have not increased the power of the Presidency by their precedent. Americans may claim to oppose this, but I think the general approach to Presidential campaigns and elections indicates that we want it this way. We want it this way because even as things get more and more bureaucratically complicated (with some proposed bills running over 1000 pages - see here or here), we want things to be simpler than they were ever intended to be. And because we feel lazy, overwhelmed with our own responsibilities (and entertainment choices), and somewhat disenfranchised. 535 Congress-people? $5.8 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions? Tracking voting (and not-voting) records? That's complicated.

Our nation-wide game of pretend allows us to focus our praise and our blame on the President. ​Nice and tidy.